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AOL Web Search Powered by Bing

As Rik announced in a recent blog post, as of January 1, Bing now powers AOL web, mobile and tablet search, providing paid search ads and algorithmic organic search results to AOL properties worldwide and exclusively in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Most major Bing Ads products are enabled for AOL search traffic worldwide, providing our clients with additional high-quality volume and more ways to reach their desired audience.

Key takeaways for advertisers

Bing now powers web search traffic across all devices for AOL: mobile, tablet and PC.

Our partnership with AOL brings a greater market share to the Bing Network. Currently, one in five searches are powered by Bing. By integrating Bing with the number three and five top search providers in the U.S., Bing now serves nearly one-third of all PC web searches in the U.S.1

AOL has many established web properties, such as AOL.com, with strong brand names and an affinity among its user base who generate several billion search queries each year.

AOL’s high-quality audience is similar to the audience Bing and Yahoo offer today – both audiences have higher household incomes, the majority have attended college, they skew slightly female and the majority of users are ages 35+.2 Both audiences also spend more online than average Internet searcher.1

In general, we anticipate a 5-8% increase in click volume in the U.S. In order to optimize this expected increase in click volume, we recommend that advertisers consider increasing their budgets to take advantage of the incremental quality volume available.

Most current ad products will be enabled for AOL’s search traffic, such as:

Annotations including Long Ad Titles, Bolding and Merchant Ratings; Customer Ratings will be in beta at the time of launch.

Product Ads will be in beta at the time of launch.

As Prince called out in this blog post, you’ll notice several changes within Bing Ads, including the Campaigns page, Reports page, the Google Import experience, and Keyword and Campaign Planners. We have also made changes in Reporting API. Read this blog post to find out more.

Call to action for advertisers

All existing campaigns are automatically opted-in to take advantage of additional volume available on the Bing Network. To ensure you are taking full advantage of this opportunity:

1. Increase your budgets. In general, you can anticipate an increase in click volume of 5-8% with additional AOL web search traffic available through the Bing Network. Make sure your budget allows you to take advantage of growing volume availability.

2. Monitor and adjust your bids, ads and keywords soon after Bing begins to power search traffic from AOL beginning January 1, 2016.

We believe that the extended reach combined with the controls within Bing Ads will give digital marketers additional opportunities to reach even more customers at the right ROI.

For further questions about the AOL partnership, please reach out to your account management team.